One
year after the runaway success of Shirithe South
Korean blockbuster that sunk Titanic and reduced the
North/South conflict into a cheesy straight-to-video populist
popcorn flickJSA calls upon its South Korean
audience to re-examine their dubious neighbors to the north.

Review
by
Adam Laidig:

A single gunshot rings out
and punctures a window in the sole North Korean outpost
next to the Bridge of No Return on a chilly October morning.
Several more shots are fired and moments later a South Korean
soldier emerges only to collapse on the historic bridge
as a small firefight breaks out between both countries around
him.
Though this latest incident
of hostilities has put further strain on North/South relations,
both countries agree to an investigation by the Neutral
Nations Supervisory Commission, a European venture between
Switzerland and Sweden dedicated to disarming such ticking
time bombs without taking sides. The NNSC dispatches two
Swiss military detectives: one an intuitive Swiss-Korean,
Maj. Sophie E. Jean (Lee Young-Ae, heard a quarter of the
time in ADR testing out her English) the other a milquetoast
soldier (Herbert Ulrich). When they arrive at the DMZ, their
superior proffers this symbol for the Korean peninsula:
a dry forest that could go up in flames with the induction
of a single spark.
Both North and South Korea
are represented during the investigatrion by their military
regimes, each radiating the usual stereotypes. Early on,
a South Korean general scoffs at the investigators' neutrality,
proclaiming there are only two types of people in this world:
commie bastards and their enemies. When Maj. Jean visits
North Korea they take her to the autopsy of the two soldiers
murdered in the incident and make pointed note of the grieving
wife and young daughter of one of the victims. The killer
is supposedly a cold-blooded capitalist puppet, who they
are certain was following the orders of his superiors.
Through two brief Rashomon-style
flashbacks both sides present their case. Despite his instance
that he crossed over to North Korea voluntarily via the
Bridge of No Return, South Korean officials believe Sgt.
Lee Soo-Hyuk (popular television star Lee Byun-Hun seen
here with the perpetual thousand-yard stare) was kidnapped
by two North Korean soldiers and dragged back to their outpost,
whereupon he managed to narrowly escape with his life. On
the other hand, North Korea maintains that Sgt. Lee deliberately
snuck across the bridge with malcious intent, opening fire
inside the outpost, shooting two of the three soldiers execution
style, and wounding the third, a sergeant portrayed by the
always great Song Kang-Ho, whose beady eyes and tightly
coiled lips match his olive green uniform.
Even though we know there
is little truth to either biased flashback, circumstantial
evidence supports the North's case. And so the film's only
revealing flashback begins, spearheaded by Maj. Jean's discovery
of discrepancies in bullet wounds versus bullets recovered
and a suicide attempt on the southern end of Joint Security
Areaan unarmed, unfortified segregated outpost shared
by both North and South Korea in the DMZ.
Given that Joint Security Area
is, at least on the surface, a mystery, to continue on would
ruin any chance of discovery for the handful of readers
who haven't seen this intriguing what-if military thriller. To
me, Joint Security Area is the antithesis of Shiri,
though the latter decidedly won the world over despite its
one-dimensional characters and painfully ridiculous plotting.
Similar to the Bosnian Academy Award winner No Man's
Land, director Park Chan-Wook uses a very real and dire
situation to question, a la Sgt. Lee, what harm is there
in hanging out with people of your own blood and just having
some fun? (Adam Laidig 2004)